“Less Human”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | First Prize: Short Story

Chukwu Sunday Abel is a Nigerian journalist and an emerging fiction writer. He writes to right. His short stories have appeared in a few magazines. Find him on Twitter: @sunabel73.

She ran haggardly and swiftly in the darkness of the night. The street lights mounted side-by-side on the bumpy road finally clicked off after several blinking minutes. The moon as if it were also against her, withdrew into its bowel stealthily after an unannounced struggle with the hovering cloud of rain. Gloomy darkness overtook the clime, rendering her eyes useless. 

She heard the imaginary stamping feet of her chasers and darted off. Her outworn Oxford dictionary held tightly to her chest with her left hand to support her flapping breasts. The other hand propelled her to safety. Her naked psoriatic feet pounded on the gravelly path, snapping stones and flinging them behind her. Her long brown lice-infested hair, fluttered in the air as much as her smeary, shredded, wind-swept gown that offered little in terms of concealing her bosomy blackened breasts, and the snarled overgrown pubic hair that stood eye-sorely in between her legs. 

She prayed for rain which had rescued her from them the night before, to extend its salvaging hands once more. She stopped running now, crouched, her two palms on her kneels, her non-parting dictionary on the ground, in between her legs. She listened to her pulsating heart and felt the dryness in her mouth. No saliva to moisten her throat. It seemed her salivary gland went on recess. She felt moistness in her private part and the dampness on her thighs. She dipped her index finger into it, brought it out, raised the finger to her eyes as if she could see whatever it was in the darkness of the night. She smiled when she realized she was menstruating. 

Esther, a beautiful insane young lady in her late twenties. Her glowing black skin, her bosomy breasts, right for the girth of her curvaceous waist (an hourglass figure), tainted thanklessly by the soiling hands of insanity. The brightness of the day granted her refuge from the randy, inhumane, homeless men at the Oyinbo market. Every nightfall came with expected race of survival or unavoidable violation by a gang of nocturnal rapists.

Since her sojourn at the Oyingbo market, she as well as other insane women faced this bizarre act that became a regularity. The government was not aware of their existence nor their plight, and even if so, they cared not about them. The laws existed but not for them. Humans but less human. Their relatives, too, had long forgotten about them. They survived by what fate brought and died by what fate brought. They would only be remembered the day a racing vehicle knocked the life force out of their bodies, or the day they died in their sleep or from poisonous scavenged food or through child bearing. They were safe from ritual killers. Their heads would give the least money. But not safe from these men who wouldn’t allow them to rest their bodies after a hectic wandering in the day; after scavenging all the dumps in the Mainland Land Local Government or beyond in search of what would make their teeth creak and calm their growling stomachs.

Once it was gloaming, they retired under the Oyingbo-bus-stop shelter, which the state government had graciously provided. No matter the distance they roved about in the day, they returned to this place; they did that promptly and consistently. Side by side they would lie. The lying spaces were tacitly shared among them. Those with kids had more space. Everyone defended one’s territory against incoming members.

This particular bus-stop shelter, protected them from the unpredictable Lagos rains. Under this bus-stop shelter, they submitted their bodies to the breeze from the Lagos lagoon that caressed their bodies dotingly, fought the diseases in their bodies and gave them strength to fend for themselves, to continue to live even though their living was worthless to the being of society. This blissful breeze protected them from the reeking Lagos gutters, the nauseating smell of the dumps that mounted here and there at the market, and the igbo, hemp smell their foes blew into the air to make their eyes woozy; but not from the long-mouthed buzzing and fast-flying mosquitoes that fed on their blood, like the sex-seeking men that were insensitive to their unwholesomeness.

That night, before they came for her, she had sat on the concrete pavement of the bus-stop shelter. Her back reclined against the black coated iron leg of the bus-stop shelter. Her hands clutched her dictionary as she tried to look up new words, before she dozed off.

They came, four of them. The ringleader, Segun, a tall black boy whose loathsomeness in the Oyingbo market was unexampled. He was a bus conductor sometime ago but then stopped. The driver of the commercial bus he had worked with, accused him of stealing from the proceeds of their hustle. Since he was dismissed by the driver, no other bus driver sought his services. He survived by pilfering from traders in the market and pick-pocketing occasionally. His second in their unofficial ranking, Azeez, was an agbero. He collected money from the Oyingbo market-women who sold their wares by the sides of the road. That was his jurisdiction. The money he realized from his routine collection, he accounted to his superiors.

They were baptized in the estuary of cruelty, insensitive to the bitter dish fate served their victims, the insane women. They did this even when vegetable-oil-coloured whores moved naked at Costain, which was a stone throw, offering sex to whomever wanted at a near give-away price.

Two out of four of them grappled her legs. The remaining two held her neck while a heavy brawny hand covered her face, pressing against her mouth and nose. Suffocating her. She jerked, twisted this way, that way. Her dictionary clenched to her body as they carried her to a secluded place. The previous ones were always in a decrepit bus whose legs had been stolen, depending on stones for its stand. Its windscreen, badly shattered. When they hauled her into the bus, Segun would be the first. He would pull down his trousers, insert his stiffed phallus into a condom, sometimes, he doubled the condom, sometimes, without any. Her legs would be held wide apart by the three others. Her face covered with a flat brown-turned-black foam, to deafen her groaning and prevent the smell that oozed out of her mouth from diffusing into their nostrils. Others would cover their noses with their hands as the thrusting went on. They took turn, one after the other until they were satisfied. 

The gripping of the hand on her face loosened and she knew that if she did nothing then, she wouldn’t be able afterwards. She opened her mouth, caught one of the fingers that gripped her face. He yanked and tugged the finger in her mouth but she wouldn’t let it go easily. She tightened her teeth, pressing them harder as he groaned louder. Others had freed her legs, slapping her face, pummeled her stomach with clenched fists. She let go of his finger, shoved two of them out of the way and bolted dauntingly.

“Make we leave am, let’s leave her,” Segun said to others, flinching from the aching finger.

“Na so that idiot mad girl run yesterday. Me I no go pity am if we catch am next time. I go do am, do am until she faint”. Azeez vociferated, glowering into the thick darkness, in the direction she absconded. He continued, “I wonder what she dey use am do self. Mad woman dey do shakara, too. Instead wey she go dey thank us wey they help am oil her dirty ganja wey dey smell like latrine. Idiot girl”. He concluded.

The breeze became violent, tossing objects into the air and setting free loosely held corrugated rusted roofs from the bound of rust-brown nails. The woebegone bus where they had sneaked into, shuttered from the resilient pressure of the breeze. Clouds of dust, nylons, empty plastic cans flurried in the air as she turned round to avoid the inrush of the soaring particles into her eyes. Soon, the rain started rushing down in torrents. The patter of the cloudburst as thick as hailstone, pelted her body. At first, it was a welcomed event to dampen her dehydrated body, soften the scales of dirt that flaked her skin. She stood woozily on wobbly legs in the middle of the road, shut her eyelids as the rain bathed her.

The downpour stopped abruptly and the sky brightened forthwith. The moon crept out of its bowel, spying on the world. Where Esther stood, puddled water drowned her feet. Her spine quaked, her teeth clattered from the freezing rain. Her soaked dictionary, clenched to her chest. She walked out of the puddle, stared at the bus-stop shelter where her colleagues lay. The other woman who had suffered such ordeal until she became pregnant, had her two-month-old baby by her side as they lay listlessly, held captive by the intrigues of sleep. 

She shook her head, dispelling the thought of returning to the shelter from her mind. She trotted toward Costain on her wonky legs. She felt slight pain in her thigh — must have sprained her thigh from her tussle with them.

The night was serene. Images appeared hauntingly when sighted from afar, leaving her terrific with heart as if swollen. She was determined to escape from their lewd claws, to put to a stop the desecration of her dirt-sullied body. She would no longer bear the pain of incessant pang by men whose conscience had been sapped by acrid lewdness, their humanity drained by cruelty.

_________________

Esther was a student of the University of Lagos, Akoka, where she was reading mass-communication. After the first semester examination in her last section in the university, she visited her boyfriend, Victor at Makoko. She would spend a few days with him before leaving for her parents’ house at Ikorodu.

It all started in the first night she spent with him. She felt evasive to his advances. His kisses and fondling were risque to her. Her disposition that night had piqued him. He left the bedroom. It was in the midnight, the clemency of the night weather coupled with the long-endured libido, forced Victor back to the bedroom. He could not resist the urges and sexually assaulted her. That was the beginning of the end of her sanity. She became delusional, heard strange voices. Voices that told her that her boyfriend would kill her, her mother was a witch, flying birds were witches and wizards in disguise, every meal given to her was poisoned. She lived by the dictates of her auditory-hallucination. 

At her father’s arrival, she was taken to the Badagry beach where a renowned spiritualist would salvage her from the hands of the marine spirits that threatened her sanity.

The spiritualist, a man with nature-entangled long dreadlocks, limpets looped in them frighteningly. His face, swamped by untended incongruous beard. Victor wondered if his grotesqueness was a requisite to his trade of healing the patients. They ambled toward a rickety hut, built at the bank of the Badagry river. A clay-walled hut with thatch roof. At the front wall of the hut was a bear-sized crystal crucifix. Gleaming heaps of wet salt teemed indiscriminately on the doorway of the hut, and wreathed the hut, to ward off evil spirits. Beside the door-frame of the hut, was a bunch of stout cane standing menacingly. All of these gave the environment a sinister aura; except for the babbling and intermittent whoosh of Badagry river and the whirring sound of breeze as it tossed the rustling pinnate leaves of the coconut trees that clustered the isthmus.

In the one-room hut were mad people, young and old, male and female. They sat side by side, giggling, rambling words, gawked this way, that way, depending on the wiles of patting hand of insanity. They laughed this moment and frowned next, leaving the visitors terrific.

Some of them whose antics were violent, had their legs bound by rusted chains. The more violent ones had the chains on their hand and legs, fastened ill-fittingly. The tightly bound fetters eating into their legs and hands, snarled them after so many months if not years of grapple.

A wooden bench was brought from the hut and placed before Victor, Mr. Jude, Esther’s father, and goggling Esther whose anger was mitigated by her father’s several plea to remain calm. Of all the people, only her father would not kill her. Her mother, Victor and every other person and all things, were after her life.

The spiritualist sat cross-legged on a raffia mat with black stripes that punctuated its overall shade of brown. His long dreadlocks hung on his occiput as allied forces of sun and age had caused his hair to recede. His front set of teeth were deficit of two. He stood abruptly, went into the hut and returned momentary with a black leather bag. Spittle spurted from the unwanted gap-tooth as he spoke. 

He emptied the content of the bag on the mat, muttered some spirit-invoking words. The bag ousted yarn white limpets, as white as his overflowing gown that swept the floor thanklessly as he walked. He picked the yarn limpets with his left hand, twirled it severally before transferring it to his right. He did same twirling while his eyes remained shut. He opened his eyes, looked at Mr. Jude, then to his glaring daughter, Esther, before he gave his revelation.

“Your daughter is mad, very mad”, he paused, looked heavenwards as if he were being spoken to. He continued, “there is strong spirit that have inflicted this madness on her, but you are at the right place. Here is called the mental problem solution giver”. He looked at Esther, shook his head and began to speak again.“ I shall bathe her seven times in the river, flog her seven times every day for seven days, then, the marine spirit will be gone”.

Mr. Jude’s eyes became bleary. He looked at his delusional daughter in pity of what she would go through. His mien told his skepticism. Victor had goose bumps all over his body when he heard the manner in which the exorcism would be done. 

They were to pay in kind or by cash for the exorcism. Either they bought a spotless white local cock, five yolkless eggs, two bottles of local gin and a bag of salt or they gave the monetary equivalent. When they agreed they would pay with cash, he immediately sedated Esther with some milky liquid he sprinkled on her. She slept off immediately, and her legs and arms were bound with rope.

_________________

The whirlwind blew threateningly, twisting the trunks of the coconut trees that scattered across the terrain. The thick darkness was not laced by the latent moon. Artificial light of any kind except candles was forbidden during the exorcism. She lay listlessly on the ground, garlanded by various burning candles. Her body soaked with salty water. He chanted round her. His voice, coinciding with the rumbling beach, the rustling leaves and the hooting of the unsleeping owls. He sang round her and lashed her buttocks intermittently — that was one of the inevitable recipes. She would wriggle rhythmically on the sandy floor, groan endlessly each time he lashed her back or her buttocks, wherever the spirit led him. Finally, she would be placed into a dugout, hauled to the river and left floating till his discretion told him to withdraw her torpid body from the river.

After some days of this uninterrupted ritual that exceeded the seven-day mark, Esther’s mental disorder plunged, defiling the spiritualist’s specious nonclinical healing powers. A questionable power that deteriorated rather than healed —  evident in the number of deteriorating delirious patients in his care. 

She became violent. The chains that bound her legs and hands peeled her skin as a result of incessant scrabbling to liberate herself from the inhumane treatment she was subjected to in the guise of getting cured of her mental illness. A process which was undoubtedly capable of deranging a sane person let alone palliating that of a vulnerable.

Victor, read into a publication by a New York Psychiatric Doctor in The FOX NEWS (Online). In the article, Dr. Johnson explained a particular mental illness and some of the noticeable common symptoms:

Paranoid schizophrenia often referred to as paranoia is a kind of psychosis which makes the patient delusional — not believing in reality. This can occur in different time even in the same person. The major symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are auditory-hallucination, delusions of persecution — believing that people want to hurt you — loss of the ability to tell what is real and what is not…The Fox News  

He picked up his phone immediately and called Mr. Jude, Esther’s father.

“I don’t think that we are doing what is right. This is the fourteenth day since we took her to that spiritualist.” Victor said.`

“But you know that what she is suffering is spiritual and it can only be ratified through spiritual way,” replied Mr. Jude.

“That is where we are getting it wrong. How did you know that it is spiritual, by intuition? You could see that your daughter is not getting better over there. That man that calls himself a spiritualist is just an opportunist.”

“What do you think we should do?” Mr. Jude.

“Sir, tomorrow morning, I suggest we go and pick her up. Let’s take her to the psychiatric hospital at Yaba. I am convinced that she suffers this mental disorder I came across in The Fox News. She exhibits the same symptom as the ones mentioned in the article”. 

The dawn was still gloaming when they arrived at the hut. Everywhere seemed deserted except for the muttering from the sleeping insane patients in the hut. They walked cautiously to the door, peeped into the hut, scanned everywhere in search of Esther. She was not among the patients sleeping dazedly on the hut bare floor. The spiritualist was not also within. They stood in the front of the hut, waiting for the spiritualist to arrive. A parrot perched on the roof of the hut, speaking verbosely, incomprehensible words into the twaddled ears of Mr. Jude and Victor. The parrot must be watching over the hut whenever the spiritualist was not around

The night before, after he had carried out the ritual: Sprinkled her with salty water, lashed her, and placed her on the river in a dugout, he hypnotized her and took her to his residence. There he subjected her to sexual assault. He chained her legs wide apart on the frame of his metal bed. He mounted over her and began injecting the fangs of misery into her. He thrust and thrust, to his pleasure, to her pain as she writhed and groaned mindlessly, flapping from one edge of the bed to another under his gripping grim, under his lewd claws until he spitted whatever he got into her.

He returned with her some hours later in her spellbound state. He told them that she was being given special treatment because of how dreaded the mammy-water that inflicted the madness on her was. 

They traveled to the psychiatric hospital at Yaba in a hired car. The day was still young when they arrived at the popular Yaba market. The traders and buyers, bending and selecting, standing and haggling used-clothes, shoes and other expired wares from the first world countries that had been dumped here as fairly used. They navigated right into the psychiatric hospital. Victor had expected as the name implied that he would see so many mad men and women in dirty, tattered clothes, legs bound in rust chains. He wondered why he did not see a wandering insane person outside the psychiatric hospital. 

Similar one-story buildings coated pale blue, stood by the sides of the driveway. Neem trees stood in front of each of the buildings, their greenish leaves dancing obediently to the tossing pressure of the morning breeze.

They alighted from the car. Esther seemed to have regained a little strength. Her eyelids were no longer clipped as they had been since leaving Badagry. She could now walk without support from her Father or Victor. They walked into the reception of the psychiatric hospital. A rusted white fan with unplumbed blades, hung on the ceiling. Its blades pointing downwards threateningly. A lot of people sat on a long black upholstered bench while some stood, resting their backs against the wall. 

Blue robed psychiatric doctors soon emerged with Victor who had gone to make the necessary entries while Mr. Jude stood with his daughter, Esther at the reception. Five of them came with him. One of them carried a stainless plate containing some medical implements. The psychiatric doctor examined Esther, looked her in the eyes before pulling her unyielding hand. She held her father tightly, tugging at his clothes.

“You are mad. You want to inject me? You must be mad,”  she repeated, making a daunting run to the exit door before the four male doctors caught her, dragged her to a bed at a corner in the reception. The psychiatric doctor was about sedating her while others held her on the bed when she felt suddenly invigorated. She shrugged their hands off her body, jostled between two of the psychiatric doctors and darted toward the exit door. Victor who had been standing near the exit door when she was dragged to the corner in the reception, blocked the door, caught her on her waist and pulled her to the ground. She was held on the ground when the needle slipped into her skin, came out with cleaned mouth after some seconds. She immediately fell asleep. The doctors carried out the necessary medical tests on her, outright.

_________________

Victor looked at the humming air-conditioner that hung inches away from the office casement. The air-conditioner was not doing enough to absolve balls of sweat that leaked out of their bodies as they waited for the Chief Psychiatric doctor.

“I am sorry for taking your time”, the doctor stretched his hand across the table toward Mr. Jude, whose slender palm was swallowed by that of the doctor’s in a handshake. He extended the hand to Victor. Mr. Jude eyes kept moving from one thing to another. From the pale blue metal cupboard, the poster on the wall showing the internal organs in the human brain, the wall table clock that stood on the modern brown table, and the files that lay on it, to the folded hands of the Psychiatric doctor on the table. His mind drifted to his daughter who had been sleeping uninterruptedly since she was sedated; the intravenous access device buried into her left hand.

“The young lady you brought her, she is your daughter if I am not mistaken,” The doctor asked

“Yes, she is,” both Mr. Jude and Victor uttered at a go.

“That is good. Sir, I want to ask you some salient questions. In your family, is there any one with history of mental illness maybe now or some years ago. Please, this include Esther’s maternal side”. Mr Jude looked heavenwards, racking his brain, wanting to produce a perfect answer as if his daughter’s cure depended on how correct his answers were. He stopped gazing upwards. His eyes centered on the weakened air-conditioner whose strength had been enervated by the Power Holding Company that gave it strength to work.

“I think my father’s brother had sometime ago shown some signs of madness. But I don’t think it was madness because it only comes and goes but after some years, he became fine. Then, he was always afraid, avoided people and called people names. He spoke big big grammar so we thought that it was excess book that made him mad”.

“So you are trying to say that the symptoms were intermittent and after sometimes the symptoms ceased to occur,” the Doctor asked.

“Yes, yes. But there is another of my father’s sister who ran away from our village. She alleged that my village people were against her life. Nobody knows if it were madness or not”.

“Thanks for your answers. See, your daughter suffers from a mental disease that is to a great extent genetic. This illness has been confirmed by the test we carried out on her. The mental illness is known as schizophrenia. It has sub-kinds but your daughter is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. One of the major symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia is anxiety, fear, hearing strange voices, believing that people want to hurt you, delusion and so many others,” the doctor explained, looking into the unblinking eyes of Mr. Jude.

“Will she get better, can it be cured ?” Mr. Jude asked desperately

“Mr. Jude, calm down. For now, paranoid schizophrenia or any kind of schizophrenia cannot be cured but it can be managed”. 

Tears surged out of Mr. Jude’s eyes. He blinked for them to recede but they stubbornly trickled down his cheeks in parallel lines. His heart heaved from a pile of emotions.

“Your daughter was subjected to inhuman treatment maybe before this illness or during. Her blood pressure is very high too. Hers is no longer acute, it is now chronic. She is going to stay here with us for some time.”

Mr. Jude walked lethargically out of the psychiatric hospital.

After a few months of antipsychotic treatment at the Yaba psychiatric hospital, Esther’s illness plunged. Victor had given up on her, her father’s pocket dried up. Esther would be ejected from the hospital into the Oyinbo market where ruffians savoured her body inhumanly. In her first week at the Oyinbo market, she salvaged the Oxford dictionary from the dumps. The dictionary became her companion. She went with it at all times, looked up words in it at her leisure.

_________________

She was now at Ijora bridge, determined never to go back to Oyinbo. The darkness of the night thickened. She clambered the Apapa-Ijora bridge. She looked at the various roads that united at the point she stood. She became confused about which to go through — the left that led to the Island, the right that led to Apapa or straight down, that led to Orile. She trotted down the steep road  that led to Orile intuitively. Trailers from Apapa wharf intermittently flashed their eye-threatening light. Some of them groaned and coughed out black smoke as they gaited onto the bridge deck. 

She descended from the bridge, now at the Orile under-bridge. She detoured leftwards. Her eyes became heavy, itching for sleep. She looked under the bridge and considered it a better alternative to her Oyingbo abode. She walked toward the bridge beam but then, her foot struck a damaged metal bucket. A man, muscular, bearded, with fear inflicting red eyes, was jolted from sleep. He hopped down from the base of the bridge beam onto the marshy floor, green mosses floated on puddles. Frogs hopped into puddles, their cacophonous croaks truncated by Esther, the invader, and by the hefty territorial man. 

She walked toward the man, her index finger in her mouth. The man switched on his giant of a torchlight, beamed it in her direction. Her succulent, watermelon breasts illuminated, bared to his eyes, so were her voluptuous curves, her pubic hairs that stood invitingly. The man positioned the spherical ray of his torchlight to her face and her face dazzled, her eyes gleamed, held wide, trying to resist the blinding effect of the ray on her eyes. The light went off and everywhere became densely dark. She lost vision entirely even with her eyes wide.

Just like the way a crocodile trails its target prey, the way it waylays its prey, Esther’s legs were swept from the floor by the muscular hand of the man who had stood some metre away from her when the torchlight was on. She fell helplessly on the marshy floor, her head fell into a puddle. She lay like a shattered ceramic plate on the floor, unshaken, unresisting. The man lay on her, slid his phallus into her unconscious body and started pounding. She twitched, gasped for breathe, for her head was in the muddy water. She gulped a mouthful of the boggy water, jerked violently. The man held her tightly, clipped his lips and thrust energetically, panging out the life force in her. 

She bade the world bye right there, at twenty eight.